


Flipside of the Moon

by ember_alda



Series: Realms of Influence [5]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Dark Character, Gen, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ember_alda/pseuds/ember_alda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Squalo doesn’t ever send Yamamoto the tapes. Instead, he goes about his mafia business, sending Yamamoto “souvenirs” from 101 hits instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flipside of the Moon

 

It started with a lock of hair.

Not that he had been alarmed, of course. It was a short hank, glittering white strands curiously tied with a brief length of green ribbon. Yamamoto had opened the small, wrapped jewelry box, curiously turning the present over and over in his hand. He’d thought Squalo was determined never to sacrifice his locks.

There was a note- more like a cream scrap cut into a square, but it had simply said,

“Squalo sends this from _Alberti Donte_.”

Yamamoto had shoved it in the back of his desk, wondering where in Italy _Alberti Donte_ was.

-0-

It’s a complete surprise, the next time. When he reaches into his desk at school to put back his notebook during homeroom break, he hears a dull sound of something being knocked over. Inside, flipped upside down, is a small box.

Black and silver, no bigger than his palm, wrapped exactly the same as the last one.

Yamamoto blinks, opening it again, slowly like a child playing games with a music box. Nestled in cotton fiber is a gold band decorated with an emblazoned jaguar in emeralds, leaping across the yellow field. The thick shine of metal and the width of it made it look like a grown man’s ring.

Yamamoto laughs; doesn’t Squalo know that his fingers couldn’t possibly be that thick?

He tucks the useless gift into his book bag, throwing away the box. He forgets about it, the expensive piece sinking in obscurity into the depths of his bag.

-0-

The beginning of every month signals another gift. He’d figured that out after the first four. They keep getting stranger and stranger. A keychain of a soccer ball, a simple silver studded earring, a red cell phone, a gift certificate for an Italian bakery, a men’s money clip.

Tsuna asks him to come with him for a summer vacation in Italy. His father had sent him a multitude of tickets, trying to make an incentive for his son to come with his circle of friends, probably in a bid to convince his son to become the tenth.

Yamamoto takes it in a stride. Sure, he says, laughing, he’d like to see Squalo anyway.

His friend is a bit surprised. Squalo being mentioned out of nowhere months after the ring battles have passed seems to Tsuna a non sequitur. The way Yamamoto spoke, there’s a certain warmth that comes from something deeper than mere acquaintance, but as far as Tsuna knows the other man hadn’t even been in Japan after that for them to interact. He hopes that Yamamoto won’t be too disappointed when Squalo opts to charge at him with the business end of his sword.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

The other boy laughs.

“I do.”

-0-

They meet more than once, but the first time they pass each other it’s outside the Vongola headquarters on the street. Yamamoto’s sure their eyes met but with the way Squalo simply glances at him before turning around, leaving with his companions, he’s not sure. Somehow it’s like a vacuum in time occurred, right then and there, and in more than just that slightest movement he felt a vibration of premonition shake his core.

Squalo sends him a note. It’s a plain vanilla envelope inscribed with a time and a place. He expected Squalo’s handwriting to be big and bold, like his shout and his words, but it’s surprisingly neat script. Across the bottom of the page dictate the simple words,

“You’re going to learn something today, brat, and then we’ll have a talk.”

Yamamoto stares at those words, knowing instinctively what the other man meant as he shifts a glance at the katana he impulsively decided to bring with him on vacation.

-0-

That night, he goes out to the bar written so precisely on his paper. He clutches his bamboo sword, unsure why he thought it was necessary at a place where people go for drinks, but as soon as he spots Squalo he gets the feeling he had done what the other man had wanted.

The dim lights showering down on the swordsman illuminates his hair into a beacon, the casual figure of his well pieced leather coat blending well with the crowd. Yamamoto suddenly feels oceans away as he realizes he’s out of place wearing khaki shorts and a t-shirt. A sense of strange de ja vu washes over as the other swordsman looks at him with the same gaze as he did out in the street that first time.

Squalo’s lips twist upward, the bitter, teeth filled smirk burning like a brand in his mind as he watches the other man slowly unsheathe his sword in the middle of a crowded room. There’s no where to run for all the people around them, but none of them are moving an inch from where they stood. Squalo is covered in an indigo glow as he strikes forward through the mass of the crowd. Yamamoto’s limbs freeze as he sees the already bloodied streaks dripping down the flat of the blade.

As Squalo walks up to him, _next_ to him, he automatically swings down his bamboo blade, warping it into metal, for all the protection that it would give him.

“This is a hit, brat. Don’t let mercy get in the way.”

Squalo moves about the room slowly, invisible and shrouded to everyone but him, and now Yamamoto feels in his blood something rising up. He can’t tell if it’s panic or apprehension, fear or disgust or fascination. The invisible man stops at a tall table, nothing but dead efficiency in his eyes as an upward swing of the blade glints soft and vicious in the mottled lights of the room. Diving down and plunging into the chest of a woman sitting closest to the dance floor, Squalo’s blade slides only once, clean and thick.

Not matter how loud the music, the scream overpowers the synthetic rhythm and Yamamoto’s own heart over powers the scream tenfold, throbbing in his brain the sound of his own blood. There is no red, everything is too dark, only a spread of a blotted shadow across the floor pools out as the target scrambles quickly and tries to shoot the gun she had concealed in her jacket pocket, waving around her arm like a worm writhing.

Ten other men had also drawn their guns, heads swerving around while the sights of their weapons gyrated madly trying to pin down the culprit, who all of a sudden is _right behind Yamamoto_ , the near silent whisper of cloth rubbing on cloth brushing vacantly across his ears.

A cold, slippery weight is pressed into his hand from behind. The boy doesn’t turn around.

“You don’t need a box this time, do you?” The shark evaporates into the damp lit streets of the night trailing whispers and whispers and whispers behind him. Yamamoto looks mechanically at what’s in his palm.

He’d seen the bracelet on that woman’s wrist.

-0-

When they fly back to Japan Yamamoto says nothing. Instead, when he goes home he gathers all the things that Squalo sent to him and looks them over, silently. The dull yellow light from his table lamp makes the collection of baubles and trash surreal, filmy.

Like a talisman, he touches each one- rubbing the gold ring under the sparkle of lights, prodding the keychain, caressing the bracelet.

He goes back to that first piece, soft but surprisingly brittle in his hand after he picks it up. When he looks at that tress of hair in his palm something climbs out, and for a moment, claws inside his gut tightly. It hadn’t been Squalo’s hair.

His eyes are drawn together, consternation tensing his forehead as he tries to fathom what it is laying on his skin. It takes hours, Yamamoto’s expression never changing as after that brief clench in his gut, he feels nothing the rest of the night.

The next day he goes out to buy a milk tea from the Seven-Eleven. At school he smiles with Tsuna and Gokudera, never far from them but not quite as near as they were to each other. The words had remained zipped tight in his throat, and even if he had felt the unceasing need to say something, it simply wasn’t possible. Those words, that night, was too fantastical to bear him into the future. He can only force his limbs to carry on like he did before.

Yamamoto never stops filling his mind with mundane things like homework, the new line of sports drink, and going out to karaoke with his friends. Somewhere down the years baseball fades away into the past as other things take its place when he grows.

Yamamoto refuses to become a swordsman. Instead he goes to high school in Osaka, and then crams for entrance exams for College at Tokyo U, going about his life like a regular Japanese citizen.

Squalo never stops sending him gifts. Yamamoto never stops accepting them.

 

THE END

 


End file.
